"all the faster" (in Latin too)

[Jonathan Lighter]

"That's almost the loudest she can sing."

It wouldn't be difficult for utterances of this sort to be transformed by young children and/or non-native speakers into "...all the loudest...."  Substitute the comparative degree and _voila_!

I'm not claiming that this actually happened, mind you, but it seems like a real possibility.

Or it did till I tried to summon up some Google exx. by using the likely phrase "That's all the biggest it...."  No hits whatsoever. Nor for "That's all the fastest it..."

So "all the + adj. (superlative degree)" would seem to be imaginary so far as Internet users are concerned.

Sorry.

JL

Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIOU.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Beverly Flanigan
Subject: Re: "all the faster" (in Latin too)
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I'm an "all the ...er" user and never thought of it as regional (Minnesota
born and bred). But I agree that Erik's examples are odd, indeed
ungrammatical for me.

At 06:35 PM 6/28/2005, you wrote:
>On Jun 28, 2005, at 11:29 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
>
>>... I think there's also a pragmatic element that can override the
>>lexical semantics. If I'm lowering some shelf, or whatever, my
>>companion can ask me to lower it a bit more and I could reply (if I'm
>>a speaker of the relevant wider dialect) "That's all the lower it
>>will/can go". Let me googlify this intuition...yup, here are a few,
>>some including pricing rather than literal height:...
>
>nice observations.
>
>erik thomas's discussion of the grammar of the construction (in
>frazer's "Heartland English") is very short -- only two pages.
>thomas accepts a certain number of examples not in cleftoid contexts,
>though they all strike me as very odd:
>
>18. An hour's all the longer that show lasts.
>20. I'm going all the faster I can go.
>21. I tried all the harder I could.
>22. He's washing dishes all the more quickly that he wants to.
>
>(22 suffers from the periphrastic comparative as well as the non-
>cleftoid context.)
>
>thomas also accepts this comparative with a "than" clause (and i don't):
>
>16. That's all the bigger than an apple they get.
>
>thomas notes that superlatives can take simple adverbs as modifiers,
>but this comparative cannot:
>
>14. That's the very prettiest she can be.
>15. *That's all the very prettier she can be.
>
>[note: the examples are thomas's, not mine.]
>
>(here, this comparative is like comparison with "as": *That's as very
>pretty as she can be.)
>
>and he notes that this comparative can't be used with "much", though
>the superlative and "as" comparison can:
>
>23. That was the most /as much as we could do.
>24. *That was all the more we could do.
>
>something i've just noticed that also differentiates this comparative
>from the superlative and "as" comparison is external modification:
>
> That was almost the loudest /as loud as she could sing.
>*That was almost all the louder she could sing.
>
>but enough of random observations...
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)



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